Something Andrew Sullivan wrote today made me want to recall that seemingly perfect morning in September, 2001. Consider this an open thread, regardless of whether you feel the same.
I arrived early at the office. I was quite proud of my office, if you must know. I had worked hard, and the gods (OK, fine, the partnership) had decided that I deserved an office with a lake view. The Seventy-fourth floor of the Sears Tower, facing east. In cold crisp air, you could see Michigan trace the long line along the lake. (In the humid, smoggy summer, you were lucky to see Hyde ParK — but I digress.)
I had tuned to NPR that morning, as I did most mornings before people were about. At about 8:10 central time, the announcer related that a small plane had struck one of the World Trade Towers. An idiot, I thought. What an idiot — must have been drunk (yes, I thought).
Shortly thereafter, the word came that the second tower had been struck. There was a note of panic in the announcer’s voice. I walked out of my office, leaned over the secretarial cube, and jokingly said, “hey, are we next?” Then, without a fear or care, I went back to work. I had a motion to file, or discovery to answer, or somesuch nonsense.
Moments passed. The PA said to evacuate. I ignored it. My wife called, and asked me to come home. No, I said, I’ve got work to do. It’s just an unlucky happenstance. My mother called next. I didn’t pick up the phone. (One of the many luxuries of large law offices is an effective caller id system.) Then — and I don’t forget the name, though politeness forbids me to repeat it — a high-level staff member said, “[von], we’re evacuating. Get out.” I blithely obeyed. But only because I liked the guy.
I was not until I was trapped standing on an overfilled El train that I realized what had happened. And that, had Chicago been the target, I would have remained at my desk until I was claimed by a very impersonal ragnorak.
And so it goes. Don’t mistake me (or others) for easy critics of the administration. I remember how I knew little when others knew better.
Anyway, that’s my 9-11 story. A couple years have passed, and maybe you’d like to repeat yours too. Maybe you need it more.
I don’t really need it, but I’ll share.
On the west coast we were still very much asleep. My wife and I had made a plan to check out a local Garden Center in the morning before work, so we rose quickly and didn’t check any media.
We drove across town. . nothing seemed different. . quieter maybe, but we weren’t really looking for anything. We walked through the garden and played Frisbee with our son for half an hour or so. There were a couple of people there with their dog and another family. Everyone was friendly.
Then we hopped into the car and drove to work. There were police cars stationed under every bridge and overpass downtown. I thought it was some kind of odd drill. We pulled up to the front of the tower where I work, but a security guard wandering outside wouldn’t let me in. He said something rudimentary like ‘The Tower’s closed’. Having no idea what was going on, I said something chirpy and stupid like ‘Well, free day off, I guess’ He gave me a funny look and we drove home. My wife and I speculated about the shutdown and cops and assumed there was some kind of bomb threat downtown. Only about halfway home did it occur to us to turn on the radio, and only then did we have any idea what had been happening 3,000 miles away. We got home and I sat down to CNN to watch people leaping to their deaths 4 hours ago.
9/11 was the day freshmen signed up for classes. I woke up at 11 a.m. or noon, hobbled over to the gym and filled out some paperwork. At some point my advisor mentioned “the attacks” and I had no clue what he was talking about. He told me that there had been a terrorist attack on the WTC, and I sort of shrugged…it wasn’t until getting back and watching some footage that I really understood what was going on.
The most emotional moment I had was actually a while later when I went home for fall break. Riding on the monorail from NJ Transit to Newark Airport gives a great view of lower Manhattan, and even a couple weeks later there was still some dust and smoke coming up from the towers’ footprints. I didn’t expect seeing the skyline to have that much of an effect on me, but it’s crystal-clear in my head to this day. Even worse than 9/11, though, was finding out that one of the anthrax letters had been sent from a mailbox a block away from my dorm room. Talk about a rough way to start your first year of college…
Well, I was in England, far removed from anything. I was doing some temping work in an office and I came back from lunch, I think, and someone said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. At this point it was ‘crashed’. I also wasn’t really sure what and where the World Trade Center was, though I knew it was in the USA. Bad accident, I thought, someone lost control, and I went back to work.
Someone obviously had a radio or something because it wasn’t long before word went round that ‘another plane’s gone into the second tower’. This was when we realised there was intent behind it. Word slowed. Workers congregated around those with radios. Every now and then word filtered through of unsubstantiated stories – a plane hit the Pentagon? Another’s been shot down? There are more planes flying in towards the East Coast? The US airforce has been scrambled? You didn’t know what to believe, but you knew someone was attacking the United States. It didn’t take much thinking to suggest a prime suspect.
Half of us tried to get to the BBC Online News, or anything we could find on the Web, but half the world was also doing just that, so the sites were down. In the end, the Head of IT politely asked us all to stop, and updated us as best he could on the situation.
By this point we all had a good idea of just how big the WTC was – so when we heard the first, and then the second, had collapsed, there was just silence. One idiot was going around muttering about the lack of work being done, but he was ignored.
My friends in the financial heart of London were being evacuated. It took me ages to get home; London’s transport network was largely shut down. I then spent the entire evening watching the footage of the second crash and the collapse on the News. The images resonating the most were the expression on one face running away as the towers collapsed; the people jumping from the buildings; the look on the President’s face as an aide whispered in his ear as he sat in that school.
And every day for at least a month after, when I heard the sound of a plane, I watched it until I knew it had gone past.
It was just a day. Beautiful and cloudless, to be sure: I was probably grumbling and muttering Ferris Bueller’s line to myself. I first heard about it from an office comment; I fired up Yahoo. Plane hits WTC. I think to myself, Must’ve been a Cessna – didn’t this happen to the Empire State Building during WWII?
Then the reports came in.
My company patched the CNN feed into the main conference room and we all crammed in, for as long as any one of us could bear it. And we watched. I remember the gasps that came from our New York team as the first tower fell – they talked to people in that building every day – and I remember feeling numb.
Eventually those of us living in the same area got together and drove the Hell home.
Spent the rest of the day watching television, assuring people that I wasn’t anywhere near the Pentagon when it was attacked and chain-smoking. At about 3PM the first people who had to walk home from DC when they shut down Metro started coming in to the complex where I was living at the time. They looked tired, shocked and severely pissed off.
In short, they looked a lot like me.
Moe
“And every day for at least a month after, when I heard the sound of a plane, I watched it until I knew it had gone past.”
Yes, that too. Although for the first few days there were no planes.
I was sitting at my desk in an open plan office and a younger man behind me (who was generally the kind of person who believes that if he sees it on the Internet it’s true – you know, a sharer of urban legends that fill our inboxes) announced “A plane just flew into the WTC!”
I said, as I recall, “Oh, sure…” but clicked on my news link to find out what (if anything) had happened.
The headline about the second plane had just come up at the top of my news page. The first photograph wasn’t online yet. What I remember best is that the first news article I read had multiple copyediting mistakes – they were corrected fifteen minutes later, but clearly it had been written in haste to get the news up as soon as possible.
What I felt was – numb. I had friends in New York: some of them worked downtown. It was some hours before I could establish that all of them were okay. (My landlords, as it turned out, had been dining at Windows on the World the night before. I didn’t know that – I knew they were away on a business trip, but I didn’t know the itinerary. I rang my landlord when they got back, about something completely other, and got the full story then.)
When the news about the Pentagon broke, for a while there was semi-hysteria – I mean that in the sense of finding black humor in the worst situations. I can’t remember any of the jokes, and that’s just as well: they’d have been funny only then.
I was working at a medical publishing company in downtown Baltimore as an Executive Assistant to the CIO. The Baltimore office was in the Camden Yards warehouse, right next to the footbal and baseball stadiums.
We had a big presentation to assemble for a meeting in Chicago later that week. I was working away when one of my coworkers poked his head into my cubicle and asked if I’d heard about the plane hitting the WTC. I brought up the Washington Post website, and there were vague reports, but no pictures yet. I emailed a friend in our New York office, which wasn’t too far from the WTC, just to see if she knew what had happened.
It quickly became clear that it was a passenger jet that had hit the WTC, and the first pictures started coming in. My email to the New York office still hadn’t gotten an answer, and I couldn’t get through to them by phone.
Then the second plane hit.
My boss was in a meeting that had been going on for quite a while, and I poked my head in to let them know what was happening. The meeting quickly broke up, and everyone went to their own offices. I went back to work on the presentation while switching over to check the news every few minutes. The reports of the attack on the Pentagon came in, and reports about all airliners being told to land ASAP, and reports of planes that were failing to acknowledge.
About this time, my wife called me. She’d been at a conference at a hotel several blocks away, but the conference was cancelled, so she was walking over to my workplace to meet me.
While she was on the way, the pictures of the towers collapsing were coming in, as well as pictures of the Pentagon burning. I remember consciously switching back to my presentation and being able to stay with it for perhaps fifteen seconds before switching back to the news. All the news potals were getting slammed, but the information was still getting out. We looked for alternates — I got a lot of my updates from the website of my hometown paper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
About this time, the security guard from the Stadium Authority came by to tell us that there had been a bomb threat and that they were evacuating. My boss and I looked at each other, and I said, “I’ll email you the presentation, and copy it to myself, and we can work on it later.” We both knew she wasn’t going to Chicago that week, but…
I emailed my father to let him know what was happening, and that I was all right, and that I loved him. We all cleared out of the building, and I waited for my wife down by the entrance. She showed up not long after, and we got in our car to drive home. I noticed that we were down to a quarter-tank of gas, and I decided that a full tank was essential. As we left downtown and found a gas station, there was absolutely no traffic on the roads, which was downright eerie.
Our trip home took us by Baltimore-Washington International Airport, and I couldn’t help peering at the sky searching for planes. Normally, they’re all over the sky, but not that day.
I did spot one fighter moving at a hell of a clip, though. He wasn’t on the right vector to have been coming out of Andrews AFB, but he was climbing like a homesick angel. I kept thinking of my AFROTC Field Training experiences at Tyndall AFB, and how I’d never expected to see fighters on CAP over Maryland.
Traffic was light on I-95, and we got home quickly. Email was exchanged with many friends, and we watched CNN for a while before turning it off. I remember looking at my wife and saying, “There’s going to be a war over this. A big one.”
As far as the day itself just got the news, turned on the tv, sat and watched. Didn’t have any personal connection to victims, don’t really know any Muslims. News. Numb, scared, gonna be a war.
I lived thru at least a half dozen of these kind of things in the 60’s. Cuban missle crisis,J Kennedy, too many in 68 to even get a count on, Wallace getting shot, Watergate. I don’t know if these things “changed everything”, I suspect they, alone or in combination, changed me. Probably for the worse.
I suspect the reaction to 9/11, excluding those with personal involvement, would vary with age. It had been a while since something really bad had happened. The young were probably disillusioned and shocked. I was, not blase, but maybe deeply tired of the world.
I was about to step into the shower in my 9th floor room when it all began.
The memories of what happened on 9/11, what I experienced, are now an indelible part of who I am.
I escaped from the Marriott Hotel, Building 3, at the World Trade Center.
I arrived at work in Vancouver, Canada, and as I was getting coffee, a co-worker said “This is unbelieveable, isn’t it?” I said “What?” He said “You don’t know? Planes were flown into the World Trade Centre.” “No. No. Terrorists?” “Looks like it.”
We spent the rest of the day trying to get info over the web. The whole office was stunned. The CEO was in the middle of negotiations with financers in London when the second plane hit, and the financers dropped the agreement on the spot because of the market response. The programmers tried to come up with a realistic estimate of the casualties after the collapses (they estimated 3,000). One of the programmers, a Palestinian, was horrified when the authorities announced that the terrorist were muslim fanatics.
On getting home, the school had sent notices home with the kids, recommending strategies for talking to them about what had happened. My son saw some footage on the news of people falling from the towers before I could grab the remote, turned his head away, and muttered “Oh my god, that’s sick. How could they have done this.”
We talked with them of all the children that would be going to bed that night without a loved one, of all the parents who had lost children, and all the people who had lost siblings and friends. We talked about the emergency workers who had lost their lives trying to save others. Everyone cried.
For weeks, Vancouver firefighters were out on the streets, collecting money in boots for the families who had lost someone. Every boot I saw was packed with money.
It was a quarter to 9 and I was on my way to my first job out of college, selling classified-ad space for a trade magazine. I was listening to one of the few radio stations in Boston that just plays solid music all morning, but the DJ broke in and said “Kind of an odd report just came in…a plane hit the World Trade Center…no word on casualties.”
Within a minute of my arrival at work, the second plane hit. A woman from our office (which only had about 15 people) went to her nearby home to bring back her TV, which we set up unpleasantly close to my cubicle. Even on my best days there I did about an hour worth of work a day, so I spent the day staring at the TV, calling my sister who lived on the Lower East Side, calling various family members and an old professor, and arguing with my co-workers. Every moment, every twist, I was hearing some new development, and my body was pretty much immobile as my inner pacifist and my inner realist got in a nasty fight.
The image that struck me most that day was of a UPS delivery guy who showed up bearing an armload of packages destined for the WTC. The reporter described him vividly, just looking lost and covered with dust, carrying all these envelopes that read “Extremely Urgent” and were addressed to people who had died. I kept coming back to him as a metaphor for what the whole country went through – the rug was pulled out from under all of us.
For months afterwards I had nightmares about plane crashes and buildings collapsing. I still seize up a little when I see a plane in a dream.
I remember driving into work and hearing about it on the radio. Again and again I heard that a different plane had crashed into each of the towers. I remember immediately realizing that it was terrorism and being annoyed that the news kept treating it like an accident. I remember tears streaming down my face and everybody at work looking ashen. We have a look into the bay off San Diego, and I saw all of the military ships go out. It was strange because there are always military ships docked. I saw pictures of the planes crashing into the towers, I saw pictures of the towers collapsing. But it wasn’t until I saw every single military ship leaving the harbour that my numb mind really comprehended what this really was.
Although for the first few days there were no planes.
Yeah, that was weird…I remember an arial photo of the US without any jet trails and it was so eerie…and then there were those military planes (wish I knew what kind) patrolling the skies over New York like Nazgul over Gondor, only friendlier…although the whole city flinched involuntarily each time we heard a plane for months….
San Francisco, 9/11/01, my sister on the EC called to tell me to turn on the TV. I’d missed the planes hitting and sat there watching Jennings talk when I screamed at him to turn around, the first tower was falling. Accompanied my wife to some offsite work she needed to do and watched a TV that was set up. Empty city, guards on the bridges, a quiet sky.
A couple other things. I remember that the pastry chef at WotW had been at Boulevard in SF in say ’99. My wife and I had sat at the counter and talked with her while she made deserts on our anniversary. I also remember becoming tired of hearing the term “Bay Area”. Our newscasters said it over and over again while describing things, “who was from the Bay Area”, “How does this affect the Bay Area” etc. etc. Even in the midst of it all, they were writing copy to keep viewers….
Finally, it took a while for me to think “mideast terrorists”. You see, while I was a country away from ground zero this time, my house in OKC was close enough to end up with a number of new wall cracks on 4/19/95.
Woke up to NPR on the radio, turned it off, thought, Wow, that was a scary thing to have dreamt about hearing. Turned on the computer to see what was up with the world, stumbled across the news, ran to the tv, had to shut it off after a few seconds. Couldn’t reach my family in NYC, found out second-hand they were ok. Spent much of the day in a mixture of denial, anger, and grief. Eventually got past the denial.
At the time, my wife and I were living in our first house on Chicago’s northwest side, on a little street named Keokuk. I’d decided to walk to the train station, because it was a nice day and the bus was nowhere in sight.
While I was waiting for the El, my neighbors John and Mary arrived and told me about the first WTC plane and the Pentagon. Like a lot of folks, I thought “well, one could be an accident, but not two.”
Still, I was surprised to see the crowds in the Clark/Lake stop. I guess I wasn’t used to thinking of terrorist threats as a reason to go home from work.
Needless to say, not much work got done that morning — we were all trying to find out what happened. Others in the office were huddled around a tiny TV as the towers fell. Rumors abounded — a fourth plane had been shot down, the plane wasn’t shot down and they thought it was headed for Chicago, there were more than four — it was well into the morning before we knew even the basic facts.
A friend who used to work with me sent me an IM saying that I should get out, just in case. I told him I wasn’t worried, that I didn’t think we’d see the feats of airmanship necessary to hit the old Motor Club building instead of the taller buildings around it. I also remember saying “we’re going to kill a lot of people over this — I hope we get the right ones.”
Finally, after lunch, we were told to go home. I learned that day that if you walk up to the Red Cross office and offer to give blood, they’re not set up to take it, so I took a cab through the deserted city to my wife’s office, and we went home.
Our house was about five miles along the path to O’Hare runway 9R/27L. Compared to the usual (and quite welcome — I loved seeing these craft low and slow over my back yard) noise, the silence was profound. This made the single aircraft I saw headed east in the mid afternoon somewhat spooky.
It was a truly gorgeous day. Not a cloud in the sky, 70 degrees or so….
The internet connection had gone out in my office, so our landlady heard on the radio and told us, and we gathered around by boss’s radio in his office a couple times–I remember thinking how strange it was to be gathered around listening to this on the radio instead of watching TV or reading the CNN website or even reading the newspaper. It was as if time had rewound fifty years ago, like we were listening to the reports from Pearl Harbor day. (It was an old fashioned, juke-box-y looking radio, which added to the effect.)
It didn’t occur to me that it was terrorism until I heard about the second plane. I remember someone saying “this is the beginning of World War III, isn’t it?”, and someone else talking about people fleeing on foot over the Brooklyn Bridge.
I had to stay at the office to finish some stupid grant report, but I didn’t actually accomplish anything–I just began the process of emailing or calling every single person I knew. I heard back pretty quickly from my family. One of my sisters was supposed to be downtown that day and overslept, but I didn’t find that out until later, so I was reasonably calm. Another was in Peru, but she managed to email us. I heard from just about everyone before my denial had a chance to wear off (in many cases it was secondhand email confirmation).
I didn’t know anyone who died, even distantly. I just knew people who knew people that died. One friend was evacuated from his apartment for weeks and weeks, and a whole lot of friends or family members actually saw it happen, in person.
It felt very strange being away from New York; I wanted to drive down and make sure the rest of the city was still there.
I worked, at the time, at a trauma psychiatry program. In the short run it made me feel like I was doing something useful, which helped a lot. (My bosses went down to Bellevue for a few consultations.) In the longer run it sort of ruined the job for me–I just couldn’t fully handle reading about the psychological effects of violence anymore; it was one thing when it happened in Cambodia and Bosnia and another when it could also happen in Manhattan.
For the next week, I occasionally would step out of my apartment, look across the Charles River, and account for the Boston skyline. I did the “follow the planes to make sure it doesn’t hit the building” thing for a while, too.
Subsequent posts have evoked more memories and, I believe, prompt more comment:
As I exited the WTC onto Liberty Street (other evacuation routes were blocked by debris), a police officer was shouting “Don’t look back!”
I couldn’t. I was barefoot, looking down and trying to avoid the chunks of metal, shards of glass and other debris, which included human remains.
When I got across West street and did look back, I never wanted to look back again.
About the second plane: I was about a block and a half, maybe two blocks away (in Battery Park City) when we heard the noise of an approaching jet. I looked up and saw it. For an instant, I thought it might be a sign that “help was on the way” (a thought I later learned was shared by many others who were there).
I understand the impact appears to be instantaneous in TV replays. But for me, it is a scene that replays constantly in my mind and lasts what seems like an eternity. The sound of metal crunching against metal. Then the explosion. Then more fire.
But the most horrific experience was the collapse of the South Tower. We didn’t realize it was imploding … we thought it would fall over on us … and fled as the stories-high, massive cloud of debris raced toward us. We didn’t know what was in that cloud. Many of us knew we were going to die.
I remember the “fortress” there at the Battery Park ferry boat ramp. An NYFD SUV drove out of the dissipating cloud from the first collapse. An exhausted fireman nearly collapsed at my side. Fortunately, vendors’ carts had been filled with water and sodas, which we shared freely.
I gave him the bottle of water I had, and he cleared his throat and nasal passage.
He then bowed his head between his legs, and began mumbling, “I’ve got to go back … I’ve got to back.”
I said words to the effect, “why, it’s futile now?”
And he said, “No, my mother works in Tower 1.”
To the person who asked about the military aircraft, I remember it explicitly. On the last ferry boat to leave Battery Park, we felt like we were fleeing Armageddon. In the middle of the Hudson River, I cringed at the sound of an aircraft. As a 27-year Air Force veteran, I was somewhat reassured to see an F-15 streaking overhead.
Today, I am totally allied with the families and friends of those who had no chance for survival that day.
We,together as a nation, must respect the memory of their loved ones, listen to them, and answer their piercing questions.
“their piercing questions” – at the risk of politicizing this thread: the 9/11 commission’s time is apparently up.
“And every day for at least a month after, when I heard the sound of a plane, I watched it until I knew it had gone past.”
Yes, that too. Although for the first few days there were no planes.
You know, I never did that, but to this day, seeing a two-engine passenger jet at the proper angle of bank gives me a little twinge.
I was in Phoenix on 9-11, I was in a rental car listening to radio on my way to look at some commercial properties. I had an early flight to get back to NYC and was schedule to give a presentation on 9-12 at 5 WTC.
My only thought, better timing than in 1993.